DAEMON MASQUERADE

I always wondered what an Obra Dinn/Golden Idol clone that did everything wrong would look like, and then I found this game. The game starts with this segment that absolutely feels like it's The Author's Poorly-Concealed Fetish, where your character is apparently a child and it feels like you're playing through somebody's weird ageplay fetish. Seriously, you could tell me the artist did a porn game and I would not be surprised in the least. It's got that feel to it. Then you get to the meat of the game, which does a lot of things poorly. One of the founding principles of Obra Dinn and Golden Idol was taking things incrementally: you start by identifying the key recurring characters and then it broadens out into larger scenes where you use what you already know as a starting point to understanding the new stuff. Another thing those games (particularly Golden Idol) did very well was conserving detail to only what was important. In Golden Idol, if you look in someone's pockets, chances are that everything they have is going to be important in some way to identifying them. Daemon Masquerade instead throws everything at you at once. It's Golden Idol by way of Chainsaw Man: Makima …

The story itself feels rushed, while the setting clearly implies something much larger and more slow-paced. Frankly, the game has one major case to solve. You have six suspects, and you need to confirm their identities and the demons associated with them. You have one week to complete the task, and each day gives you more clues. However, most of the cases cannot really be solved until the final days. Because of that, the optimal strategy is basically to sleep through the entire week and solve everything in one go. The additional clues make the cases easier, and by waiting, you know for sure that you have all the information available. So the main gimmick feels kind of weak. Most of the discovery devolves into cross-referencing the demon book to match demon abilities with descriptions, which is boring and unfun. And when the game asks for proof, you mostly just point it in some vague direction, and your assistant connects the dots himself. Solving the puzzles does not create a “gotcha” moment in your mind. Most of them feel more like, “Eh, maybe this?” and then your assistant does the rest.

it's too disorganized. i want imoportant things to be automatically highlighted

This was an interesting deductive reasoning game. I really enjoyed playing .

This was so fun for me specifically as a greek mithology nerd I love that someone else is obsessed w daemons

Amazing mystery game that truly challenges your skills of deduction!! Highly recommend for fans of puzzle solving and/or detective games.